Marshall Keeble (1878-1968), born to former slaves near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, became in time the most successful evangelist among Churches of Christ, baptizing converts in the tens of thousands. As a youth with a seventh-grade education, Keeble labored in a soap factory until he married Minnie Womack, a daughter of S W Womack, a minister of Churches of Christ, and the newly married couple opened a grocery store in Nashville. Under the tutelage of his wife and his father-in-law, Keeble began preaching in Nashville churches by 1897 and by 1914 was traveling on his own as an itinerant evangelist while his wife minded the store.

In 1918 Keeble planted a church at Oak Grove, near Henderson, Tennessee, baptizing 84 persons and coming to the attention of Nicholas Brodie Hardeman, influential president of the local Freed-Hardeman College. From 1920 until his death Keeble traveled throughout the American South and, ultimately, worldwide at the expense of Nashville millionaire Andrew Mizell Burton, baptizing hundreds yearly. In 1931, at the depth of the American economic Depression and the peak of his powers as a preacher, Keeble brought 1,071 blacks and an untold number of whites to decisions that resulted in baptism. In that year Keeble preached in 14 campaigns, establishing six new churches. In Bradenton, Florida, Keeble and his helpers baptized 115 persons in one day, and a total of 286 during that campaign. Keeble's 1931 sermons in Valdosta, Georgia—where 166 were baptized—were recorded by stenographers, and the transcripts became the basis of a slender volume edited by another influential patron, Benton Cordell Goodpasture.

After 1942 Keeble was nominally president of Nashville Christian Institute, a segregated private academy primarily designed to educate young blacks for ministry and evangelism. He traveled extensively in the company of young "preacher boys," evangelizing and raising money for the school. His fees for preaching were paid directly to NCI, since A M Burton provided Keeble's salary and expenses. From 1939 to 1950 Keeble was also the nominal editor of Christian Counselor, a monthly journal published by Gospel Advocate Company. Both the school and the journal were projected, at least in part, by the Nashville white establishment to offset the independent efforts of George Philip Bowser. The journal failed in its mission, but did not cease publication until Bowser was dead. NCI continued until desegregation and the civil rights movement had made it an anachronism; it closed in 1967, less than a year before Keeble's death.

From the beginning of his career Keeble proved a master of the English Bible and human psychology, by his own account finding in Booker T Washington a primary role model. Keeble's relations with his white patrons, who plainly sought to use him as an instrument of social control, were inevitably laden with ambiguity. He did not simply tell white folks what they wanted to hear. Keeble was, rather, the first evangelist among Churches of Christ to transcend the twentieth-century "color line," and very nearly the last. He spoke often in homespun "parables" that communicated to blacks quite differently than to whites, but ultimately Keeble communicated "good news" to blacks and whites alike.

White contemporaries and hagiographers have often eulogized Keeble's "humility," but few of them have understood it for what it is. Keeble's humility is genuine, but it is founded on the bravado of Brother Rabbit, who in countless slave tales outwits the Fox and the Bear by pitting his weakness against their strength. No one in his time and place possesses more formidable psychological and rhetorical weapons than Keeble, or wields them more effectively.

Keeble enjoyed the patronage of the powerful, and he radiated joy in his life and work, but he did not escape the suffering promised to those who proclaim God's good news in every age or the humiliation imposed on every American of African descent in his time and place. He preached with guns pointed at his head and while being struck with brass knuckles and rocks, never dropping a syllable—and, as one envious white contemporary famously remarked, "Keeble preached it hard." He did not dispense the soothing potions of professional pastors, but as a contentious evangelist in a cauldron of competition he poured out polemic in an ever-rolling stream. Contemptuous of unimmersed faith, Keeble never missed an opportunity to champion the value of burial in water over what he called "dry cleaning." "The devil wants you dry," he told his audiences, "so you'll burn better." Keeble believed fervently and proved repeatedly that there was no argument that he and the Bible could not win. "The Bible is right!" he declared, and he left no room for doubt that he was on the Bible's side. Yet Keeble delivered his hard, uncompromising message with elegant wit and unalloyed love; his "parables," carefully couched in the images and idioms of his audiences, conveyed his practical guidance for everyday life and his truly evangelical call to share in the hope of heaven.

Faith, hope, and love sustained him in a long life. Keeble buried his first wife and all five of his children. He suffered every kind of indignity, insult, and injury. Racists, in and out of the church, did not deter him, but neither did he resist them directly. When Keeble died, two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, many of his white eulogists offered invidious comparisons between Keeble and King. Yet one of his "preacher boys," Fred D Gray, inspired by Keeble's preaching and example, had by then become the attorney who overturned de jure segregation and discrimination in the American South, representing Rosa Parks, King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and many other activists and causes in the civil rights struggle. Keeble himself enjoyed the new privileges and personal freedoms that civil rights agitation had brought, but he had lived on earth as a stranger and an exile, in search of that "better country, a heavenly one," hoping to bring others along.

Bibliography:

Biography and Sermons of Marshall Keeble, ed by B C Goodpasture (Nashville: Gospel Advocate, 1931);
Julian E Choate, Roll Jordan Roll: A Biography of Marshall Keeble (Nashville: Gospel Advocate, 1968);
Willie T Cato, His Hand and Heart: The Wit and Wisdom of Marshall Keeble (Winona MS: J C Choate Publications, 1990);
Forrest Neil Rhodes, "A Study of the Sources of Marshall Keeble's Effectiveness as a Preacher," unpublished PhD dissertation, Southern Illinois University, 1970.

Don Haymes